Re: webservice/local aspell
My only concern in doing this as a webservice is the overhead.  Now, I'm
already thinking of doing this via google - so part of the overhead is
already there, the only concern would be network latency -- as a webservice
I could easily change to host it locally should network response become
problematic.  I can also swap out the back end if that were needed w/o
affecting any/all apps using the service.  This is the design concept of
being loosely coupled which lately has been roped into the buzzword of SOA
(service-oriented architecture).

Although, I really haven't started digging into this aspect of the design
for this smart search, and perhaps going with a local aspell just for the
speed would be worth it (gotta build & maintain a dictionary tho).

Re: input/output
While a URL-based query could work for a lot of situations, I could see
unicode/diacritic issues mucking things up a bit.

If this were built as a webservice, perhaps something along the lines of...

Input: (UTF8 encoding)
* Word, string, required
** the word to be checked
* Suggest, boolean, optional (deafult to true?)
** whether or not to suggest alternate spellings (only if invalid word?)
* Language, string, optional (default to us_en)
** standard language code (us, 
* Domain, string,  optional (default to global/master/all/whatever)
* Version, decimal,  optional (default to latest)

Output: (UTF8)
* Word, string, from original query (auto-correct like google?)
* Language, string
* Valid, boolean, whether the word is a valid spelling
* Suggestions,(group)
* Version, decimal

Andrew Forman
University of Iowa Libraries
ISST Development
319 335 9152

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eric
Lease Morgan
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2005 9:13 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] spelling server

On Sep 13, 2005, at 8:53 AM, Forman, Andrew B wrote:

> I've been asked to create a "smart search" a.k.a "be like google 
> without any of the resources" ;) for our upcoming new library home 
> page....
>
> I did see something on #code4lib about an ockham server?
> Would/should that be part of this?

If I were to write such a Web service, I very much suspect it would be
hosted on ockham.org.

What would suggest the shapes of the input and output look like?

--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame

(574) 631-8604
AIM: ericmorgan